Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

There’s another flash of light, and then darkness.

Art sees Raul and Adan being dragged up the hill toward some Land Rovers at the top of the hill, near the main house.

He heads for them.

Bullets stitch around his feet.

A slight man with rimless glasses comes out the front door of the cottage and starts to run up the hill, but a short burst of bullets catches him as he runs, and he flies backwards like a silent-movie comic slipping on a banana peel.

The door slams shut behind him and gunfire starts to blaze from the windows. Art drops to the ground and crawls toward Nora. Callan moves beside him, rolls, shoots in bursts of two and then rolls again.

Then Callan yells behind him, “Rounds!”

A second later a grenade whooshes through a window of the cottage and explodes.

The shooting from the cottage stops.

Raul shrieks with agony as his men lift him into the backseat. Adan gets in from the other side and cradles his brother’s head in his lap.

Raul grasps his hand and whimpers.

Manuel jumps behind the wheel. Raul’s men try to stop him, but Adan yells, “I want Manuel!” and they let him go. The car starts up the beach, every bump a jolt of agony for Raul.

Adan feels as if his brother’s grip is going to crush the bones in his hand but he doesn’t care. He strokes Raul’s hair and tells him to hold on, everything is going to be okay.

“Agua,” Raul mumbles.

Adan finds a plastic bottle of drinking water in the seat pouch, twists off the cap and holds the bottle to Raul’s mouth. Raul gulps it down and Adan feels the water pour onto his own shoes.

Adan turns and looks back down the slope.

He sees Nora’s limp body.

“Nora!” he screams. Then, to Manuel: “We have to go back!”

Manuel isn’t having any of it. He has the car in first gear, four-wheel drive, and is moving slowly up the hill, another Rover falling in behind, the sicarios pouring cover fire out the back.

Tracer rounds arc through the night like lethal fireflies.

A rocket-propelled grenade hits the car behind Adan’s and explodes, sending shards of heated metal spinning into the air. The driver tumbles from the car in flames and twirls like festival fireworks in the night. Another body slumps out the open side of the car and sizzles on the rocks.

Manuel hits the accelerator and Raul screams.

Art sees one of the Rovers go up, tries to peer through the flames and sees the lead Rover chugging up the slope.

“Goddamn it!” he yells. He turns to Callan and orders, “Stay with her!” He shifts Nora’s dead weight onto Callan and starts running toward the escaping Land Rover. Rounds from the main house buzz around his head like mosquitoes. He puts his head down and keeps moving, past the burning Rover and its charred bodies, toward the other Rover that’s struggling up the slope in front of him.

Adan sees him, twists around and tries to get his pistol in position to get a shot, but every muscle he moves sends Raul into a fresh paroxysm of pain. He sees Keller, still running, bring his rifle to his shoulder.

Adan shoots.

Both men miss.

The Rover crests the ridge. It slips into its downhill slide and Raul screams. Adan holds him tight as the vehicle picks up speed.

Art stands on the edge of the ridge. He’s hunched over, catching his breath, as he watches the Rover rumble away from him.

He takes three deep, gasping breaths, raises his rifle to his shoulder and sights in on the back left windshield, where he last saw Adan. He takes a long breath, then squeezes the trigger on the exhale.

The car keeps moving away.

Art trots back toward the main house.

Scachi’s men go about their jobs in a workman-like, unhurried fashion. One squad lays down cover fire in short, disciplined bursts, while the other squad moves forward; then they exchange roles. Three rotations of this tactic get one of the men to the side of the house. He presses flat against its stone walls as the others pour fire through the windows. Then, on a signal, they stop shooting and Scachi’s guy attaches a charge to the door and throws himself to the ground as the door splinters.

The other mercenaries jump in.

Three quick bursts of gunfire, and then silence.

Art goes in.

It’s a charnel house, a madhouse.

Blood everywhere, dead and wounded bodies, Scachi’s mercenaries moving efficiently to dispatch the sicarios who linger between worlds.

Three dead sicarios are sprawled on the floor of the front room. One of them lies facedown with two entry wounds in the back of his head. Art steps over him to get into the bedroom.

There are eleven more bodies.

One wounded man, his shoulder a splotch of red, sits against the wall with his legs splayed in front of him. Scachi walks up to the wounded man and swings his foot like he’s trying to make a fifty-yard field goal against the wind.

His boot hits the man’s balls with a solid thump.

“Start talking,” Art says.

The sicario does. Adan and Raul were here, so was La Guera, and Raul was badly hurt, gut-shot.

“Well, that’s happy news anyway,” Scachi says. He does the same calculation that Art does-if Raul Barrera has been shot in the belly, he isn’t going to make it. He’s as good as dead-better, in fact.

“We can catch them,” Art tells Scachi. “They’re on the road. Not far ahead.”

“Catch them with what?” Scachi asks. “You bring a jeep?” He looks at his watch, then yells, “Ten minutes!”

“We have to go after them!” Art yells.

“No time.”

The man keeps spewing information-the Barrera brothers left in the Land Rover, headed for San Felipe to get help for Raul.

Scachi believes him.

“Take him outside and shoot him,” he orders.

Art doesn’t blink.

Everyone knew the rules going in.

The Land Rover rattles over the busted road.

Raul screams.

Adan doesn’t know what to do. If he tells Manuel to slow down, Raul will certainly bleed out before they can get him help. If he tells Manuel to speed up, Raul’s suffering is even worse.

The left front tire drops into a wash and Raul shrieks.

“Por favor, hermano,” he murmurs when he catches his breath. Please, brother.

“What, brother?”

Raul looks up at him. “You know.”

He turns his eyes to the pistol at his hip.

“No, Raul. You’re going to make it.”

“I… can’t… stand it… anymore…” Raul gasps. “Please, Adan.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m begging.”

Adan looks at Manuel.

The old bodyguard shakes his head. He’s not going to make it.

“Stop the car,” Adan orders.

He takes the pistol from Raul’s belt, opens the car door, then gently slides out from under his brother’s head and lays it back on the seat. The desert air is pungent with sage and hermosillo. Adan lifts the pistol and points it at the top of Raul’s head.

“Thank you, brother,” Raul whispers.

Adan pulls the trigger twice.

Art follows Scachi out onto the beach, where Sal makes the sign of the cross over two dead mercenaries. “Good men,” he says to Art. Two of the other mercenaries carry the bodies back onto the Zodiacs.

Art trots up the beach, back to where he left Nora.

He stops when he sees Callan walking toward him, carrying Nora over his shoulder, her blond hair hanging down around her limp arms.

Art helps him heft her dead weight into the boat.

Adan doesn’t go to San Felipe, but instead to a small fishing camp.

The owner knows who he is but feigns ignorance, which is the smart thing to do. He rents them two cabins in the back, one for Adan, the other for the driver.

Manuel knows what to do without being told.

He parks the Land Rover right next to his cabin and carries Raul’s body inside and into the bathroom. He lays the corpse in the bathtub, then goes out to get a knife like the fishermen use. He comes back in and butchers Raul’s body, severing his hands, arms, feet, legs and, finally, his head.